r -- -J ' ( .... 1.- -.- \ .... L .... ---:.,.;--:::::- - . " . '4 , ,, ! . . "', ..:::.. ____ ....;;...--: t J , .' , ::- 'yr 54 I hl . f , I _/- o . , .,+ - --/ ^ .... .. ... .. " ,if "'!II. .. a & ":?--...----. ............... v - ^,- .,. ,.. ,. ,.,,- '1/; . . " -- , i v .. _.' ...'0' . . ,"",..: $, <i iJj .... . J S h Y'\ hG:\v} '1 liked it better on top of my husband" . and a half million given to the Republi- cans. (There is no limit on such soft- money donations.) For the 1992 elec- tions, Time Warner dispensed four hundred thousand dollars in soft money, three-fourths of it to the Democratic Party. MCA gave two hundred and fifty- eight thousand dollars, more than ninety per cent of it to the Democratic Party. U nsurprisingly, there are also less no- ticeable ways to curry favor. For instance, gifts to the Progress and Freedom Foun- dation, the think tank closely tied to Speaker Newt Gingrich-or to Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole's charity for the disabled, the Dole Foundation- won't show up in standard campaign- finance reports. And, of course, money is not the only form that gifts can take. Tele-Communications, Inc., has made some of its channel space available to National Empowerment Television, a politically conservative programming ser- vice that has been championed by Gingrich. Liberty Media's Peter Barton says that the service was put on cable be- cause it generated a good audience in various markets where it was tested. There may have been other reasons, too, since John Malone, the chief executive officer ofT.C.!., is a libertarian conser- vative, and since documents on file with the Federal Elections Commission reveal . that in the week before the November elections T.C.!. shovelled two hundred thousand dollars-soft money-to the Republican National Committee. S INCE the elections, a lobbyist says, the local telephone companies have shifted from donating their PAC money more or less evenly to awarding about seventy per cent of it to Republicans. Frank Biondi says that since the 1994 elections Viacom's PAC donations have been "more balanced" than they were be- fore November. This month, Viacom had planned to sponsor a fund-raising breakfast for Larry Pressler, of South Dakota, who is now the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. Accord- ing to one Viacom executive, a friend of Pressler's phoned to request the fund- raiser. The intermediary is reported to have said, "The Senator would like Sum- ner to do it." The goal, another Viacom executive said, was to raise thirty thou- sand dollars for Pressler's 1996 reëlection campaign. According to Viacom, Sum- ner Redstone, a lifelong liberal Demo- crat, who worked in the Truman Ad- ministration and has raised money for the Kennedys and Clinton, had not yet decided whether to lend his name or his liberal reputation to Pressler, a conserva- tive Republican. But this is about busi- THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 5, 1995 ness, not personal convictions. "The practical realities of life are that Re- publicans are in control of congres- - L sional committees," Biondi says. ". . j 'We recognize that. And we'll deal . with it." The practical realities are also that Viacom wants to avoid em- yj' barrassing publicity, so last week, af- I ter inquiries were made by The New : Yorker, the plans for the fund-ralser were dropped. Pressler has lately been doing a sort of whistle-stop tour: he has held a series of fund -raisers involving the communications industry, and the stops have included T.C.!., in Den- ver, a five-hundred-dollar-a-head Motion Picture Association of America fund-raiser in Hollywood, and, in New York, an event spon- sored by Time Warner at the "21" Club, one sponsored by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., and one at the home of the former media mo- gul John Kluge. Asked through a spokeswoman about the propriety of a committee chairman's shopping for money from industries he regulates, Pressler declined to respond. An experienced telephone-company lobbyist responded to the same question this way: "These committees have these companies by the balls. It's the cost of doing business. What contributions do is prevent your opponent from gettIng an advantage. If you don't give, you build up subtle resentments." In the sense that incumbency gets re- warded, none of this is new. Neverthe- less, the magnitude of the shift of money is startling. "If you close your eyes you can hear money pouring into Washing- ton," I was told by the communications attorney Nicholas W. Allard, who used to work on Capitol Hill as chief of staff for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And figures from the Federal Election Commission reveal that in January, Feb- ruary, and March of this year-the lat- est period for which the F.E.C. has com- puterized the filings-PAC giving has swung sharply to Republicans. A.T. & T., which has been fighting to make inroads in providing local phone service, and which gave fifty-nine per cent of its po- litical contributions to Democrats in the last election, reported giving four times as much to Republicans as to Democrats in those months, including five thousand dollars to ThomasJ. Bliley,Jr., the chair- ,